This blog is written by a journalist based in Mumbai who writes about cities, the environment, developmental issues, the media, women and many other subjects.The title 'ulti khopdi' is a Hindi phrase referring to someone who likes to look at things from the other side.

Tuesday, January 06, 2015

I’ve written no fiction since my first visit to Palestine in 2000: Ahdaf Soueif

My interview with Ahdaf Soueif in The Hindu, Literary Review, January 3, 2015

Ahdaf Souief: novelist and political and social commentator. Photo: R. Ravindran

The events following the “Arab Spring” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square have not
unfolded quite the way protestors had imagined. In 2011, Egyptians
looked forward to a change. Today, three years later, the object of
their protests, former President Hosni Mubarak, has been exonerated by
Egyptian courts, the experiment with a non-military democratically
government has failed and instead today, another military man, President
Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is at the helm.

One of the strongest voices during the protests in Egypt and since then
has been the remarkable writer and activist Ahdaf Soueif. Born in Cairo
and a PhD in linguistics, Soueif caught the world’s attention when her
book, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
in 1999. Of late, however, she is known for her documentation of the
Egyptian struggle for democracy, evocatively captured in her book, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution and her columns in The Guardian.
Despite the turn events have taken in Egypt since the heady days of
2011, Soueif continues to write and protest and believes that is what
writers like her must do.

Would you say that your involvement in the “Arab Spring” and the
events in Tahrir Square in 2011 marked a transition in your writing from
fiction to non-fiction?

Well, actually, I’ve written no fiction since my first visit to
Palestine in 2000. I got caught up in a kind of cultural activism where
it always seemed that the next article, the next event had to have
priority over any longer project. So the longer projects never got done.
This became even more acute with the Egyptian revolution (and, yes, we
still call it a “revolution”) and even got formalised in a weekly column
for the Egyptian national daily, Shorouk. So Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (second edition: Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed) is the only sustained text of length that I have managed to write in 15 years.

Since 2011, Egypt has gone through tremendous change and turbulence.
How do you see the situation now, particularly against the background of
Hosni Mubarak’s exoneration by the court?

The revolution forced the regime (or maybe gave the regime the
opportunity?) to dislodge the Mubarak family. But the revolution never
took power. What we’re now seeing is Regime Version 4. Version 1 being
Mubarak; 2, the year of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to whom
Mubarak delegated power; 3, the year of Dr. Morsi and the Muslim
Brotherhood; and 4 the period of Judge Mansour and General Sisi —
post-July 2013. Every group that has taken power since Mubarak fell has
tried to continue in his same mode of government but with its own
players, and every one of them has sought accommodations with the
establishment to do so. We now have a situation where army, police,
judiciary, media, bureaucracy, big business have all identified their
interests as anti-revolutionary and are working — lying and perjuring
and killing — to protect and enhance them.

Many of the activists involved in the Tahrir square uprising are
still in jail. What about the others who escaped arrest? Have they
managed to continue organising, albeit in a clandestine manner?

People are still active, but also a lot are downhearted and divided.

In an article in The Guardian on June 29, 2014, you accused
the present government lead by President Sisi of “waging a war on the
young”. You saw the expedited trial of 24 human rights activists,
including your niece, as a sign of this. Do you see any prospect of this
changing? Will international pressure make any difference?

At the moment there is no international pressure on Egypt to respect
human rights. In fact, the regime is being courted by the West as an
ally in the ‘War on Terror’ and rewarded for its rhetoric and its
activities in Sinai and who knows where else. Money and promises of
money are pouring in from the Gulf countries, loans from the
international financial institutions, and contracts, aid packages and
arms from Western governments. Having said this, it’s really important
to note that there is great concern and solidarity from civil society
across the world. The pressure that is coming is coming from citizen
groups, human rights groups and professional bodies: Universities, Bar
Associations, medical associations and so on. This is the solidarity and
the co-operation that we’re seeking now.

In another article in The Guardian you wrote, “The great
slogan of the revolution — Bread, Freedom, Social Justice — has been
whittled down to grateful for a crumb and a quiet corner.” Is this an
expression of despair for the future or do you still believe that once
people have been awakened to demand their rights, you cannot push them
back?

I don’t feel despair. I just feel very sad at all the lives lost and the
lives ruined. And that we will have to go through more sorrow and
violence before we can start working to create a better society. There
were reasons for the revolution, objective reasons: the difficulty of
making a living, of providing a decent life for your children, the
obscenely widening gap between rich and poor, the breakdown of education
and healthcare plus, of course, the ever-worsening police brutality.
All these conditions still exist. They’re getting more acute as the
state insists on its economic path and tightens its grip on spaces of
opposition, and they will lead to the new uprising. The difference next
time will be that each faction has learned a different lesson from the
events of the last four years, and that the country is awash with arms.

One of your remarkable initiatives has been the Palestine Festival of
Literature (PalFest) where you believe in ‘the power of culture over
the culture of power’, quoting Edward Said. What role do you think
interventions of this kind make in informing the world about the
realities in Palestine? The media only covers this region when there is
conflict. Why do you think arts, literature, cinema coming out of that
region needs exposure and recognition?

PalFest (www.PalFest.org) is really a unique literary festival. It
travels through the Israeli checkpoints between Palestinian cities, so
every day it is with its audience in a different place. The writers do
workshops and seminars in universities and literary and cultural events
in the evenings. They really get to know the Palestinians as people —
not just as a “cause” or a “conflict” or a “problem”. It’s really
important that the world understands that in Palestine there is a people
who are trying to live, work, write, bank, dance, marry, learn — in
other words to live a normal life on what’s left of their land, in the
face of tremendous aggression and constant incursions and attempts at
take-over by Israel. One of the most immediate ways of conveying the
“realness” and the normal humanity of the Palestinians is through their
own cultural production and that of their friends and allies.

About Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif is a political and cultural commentator and novelist. Her account of recent Egyptian events, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, was published in 2012, and an updated edition, Cairo: A City Transformed, was published in January 2014. She is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999), as well as the well-loved In the Eye of the Sun and the collection of short stories, I Think of You. A collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, was published in 2004. She has translated Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah from Arabic into English and commissioned and edited Reflections on Islamic Art.
In 2007, Soueif founded Engaged Events, a U.K.-based charity. Its first
project is the Palestine Festival of Literature, which takes place
annually in the cities of occupied Palestine and Gaza. She has received
the Metropolis Bleu and the Constantin Cavafy Awards (2012). She was the
first recipient of the Mahmoud Darwish Award (2010) and was shortlisted
for the Liberty Human Rights Award (2013).

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My profile

Journalist, columnist, writer based in Mumbai. Author of "Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia's largest slum" (Penguin, 2000). Worked with The Hindu, Times of India, Indian Express and Himmat Weekly.
Other books include "Whose News? The Media and Women's Issues" edited with Ammu Joseph (published by Sage 1994/2006), "Terror Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out" edited with Ammu Joesph (published by Kali for Women, 2003) and "Missing: Half the Story, Journalism as if Gender Matters" (published by Zubaan, 2010).
Regular columns in The Hindu, Sunday Magazine and on The Hoot (www.thehoot.org).